Bodog Backing Out of 20 Countries

Thursday, August 9th, 2012 by Ryan

Bodog is one of the most popular online casinos in the game today, but it seems that they are continuing to go in just the opposite direction of expanding. After the massive company decided to move out of the United States, which led to the creation of Bovada, they are apparently now deciding that they want to back out of an additional 20 countries as well. The decision was made through Bodog Europe, who owns the exclusive license that goes along with the brand of gambling throughout all of Europe, and the change came as a shocker to everyone in these countries.

The news was broken after some interesting emails were received by Bodog Europe players. The emails stated a few different things, but the main thing stated that the online casino was going to be more selective on who they would allow to play on their site. The news means that after the 30th of August, that Bodog Europe is not going to be processing payments for players in specific jurisdictions their standard way. If players are looking to get money off of their account before that point, then they would have to email through customer service to get it taken care of. If they do want to get their money off of the site then they need to take their accounts down as much as they want before that date.

There were quite a few countries that are affected by this, and they include the following (in alphabetical order), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Uzebekistan. The email that was sent out didn’t feature any specific reason as to why this decision was being made. Rumors began spiraling just after this email was sent out as well, so Bodog stepped up and went into detail about their decision, stating that they had done this in order to focus on their strengths in the other jurisdictions. Also that they want to continue to grow their existing markets, and focus on maintaining a “high level of customer service and that spreading ourselves too thinly to try and cover a huge amount of smaller markets was proving logistically difficult.”

This is obviously an interesting bit of news coming out of Bodog, but it’s one that is great for the other countries who are still going to be playing under this site. If their customer service was suffering, and this includes their payment processing and such, then the decision to focus on specific areas could work out to expand their business a very good amount. You can also bet that they are only eliminating their very small markets that won’t lose them a ton of business, which is something that won’t hurt them too much either.

We’ll keep you updated on this situation with Bodog, and see if anything changes moving forward. There is always the chance that some additional countries could be added to the list, but that right now it seems that Bodog is focused on moving forward with what they have.